


It's Too Late

by SocialDegenerate



Category: Weiß Kreuz
Genre: Amnesia, Anal Sex, Angst and Porn, Cheating, M/M, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2019-12-11
Packaged: 2021-02-25 05:20:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21750670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SocialDegenerate/pseuds/SocialDegenerate
Summary: After the events of Glühen, Aya watches the stranger who wears his ex-lover's face.But despite not exactly being the authority on healthy relationships, he suspected that Yohji wasn’t particularly satisfied with the second chance he’d wanted, then rejected, then gotten anyway. For one, Aya suspected that a man in a happy marriage would spend less time sneaking into love hotels with people who weren’t his wife.
Relationships: Fujimiya "Aya" Ran/Kudou Yohji
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	It's Too Late

**Author's Note:**

> You know, sometimes you rewatch an old DVD set and you end up smashing out 3000 words for the first pairing you ever wrote just so you can end the decade doing the same thing you were doing at the start of it. Hopefully this fic is a little better than what I was writing way back in 2010 (which are still out there if you know where to look).
> 
> This is not a fix-it, it's an unhappy little interlude set between Glühen and Side B. Cheating is awful and you shouldn't do it, but somehow I don't think these florist-assassins are the authority on morality. (If you happen to be here because I posted this and not because you know what WK is, yes, they're florist-assassins, it's a whole thing, don't even worry about it).

Ken had asked, once and only once, if Aya had seen Yohji since his return to Japan.

Aya had lied.

Or maybe he’d told the truth. The man he watched from the shadows wasn’t Kudoh Yohji: he was a man with the same face, but without the memories there was nothing there that made him the man Aya remembered. He was a salaryman with a legitimate job and a pretty wife, even if Aya happened to know that she was a Kritiker agent whose name had only been Asuka for as long as she’d been tasked with watching over Yohji.

Maybe they loved each other, regardless of Omi’s- _Mamoru’s-_ interference. It wasn’t like Aya would be able to tell.

But despite not exactly being the authority on healthy relationships, he suspected that Yohji wasn’t particularly satisfied with the second chance he’d wanted, then rejected, then gotten anyway. For one, Aya suspected that a man in a happy marriage would spend less time sneaking into love hotels with people who weren’t his wife. The women weren’t a surprise: if there was anything that Yohji didn’t need his memories to know, it was how to chase any beautiful woman who caught his eye.

What _was_ more surprising were the men. Not that Yohji swung that way: Aya had enough first-hand experience with that to know just how broad Yohji’s tastes were. It was more of a surprise that Yohji somehow managed to find a string of pale, long-haired men who were willing to hold him down and fuck the nightmares out of him.

(Aya hadn’t personally witnessed that part, but if the women hadn’t changed then he doubted the men had either.)

In the end, it became a game. A little distraction from the cold, solitary life of taking freelance jobs that he pretended hadn’t filtered down from Kritiker, and that Mamoru probably pretended he didn’t know were getting handed to Aya. One that asked, if Yohji had fallen back into old habits without even knowing it, then how much of his old life was still locked somewhere in his brain?

The first time he’d purposefully let Yohji see him, walking towards him on a busy street in Shinjuku, Yohji’s eyes had skipped right past him. The lack of recognition might have stung, if Aya could feel anything beyond tired.

That was when he’d started growing his hair out again.

Yohji’s eyebrows drew together in confusion the time that Aya crossed the street in front of him in a flowing trench coat, as if he were trying to remember something prodding at the back of his memory. As his hair grew longer and he began keeping it back in a ponytail and then a braid, Yohji seemed to watch him closer each time. And when Aya combined the coat with a braid and walked past Yohji so closely that their arms had almost brushed, Yohji made a sound that seemed like an aborted attempt at actually speaking to him.

It was a stupid, dangerous thing to be doing but without a team to tell him he was being obsessive, Aya slowly became addicted to the feeling of watching Yohji struggle to remember someone he didn’t even know he’d forgotten.

And that was when he found himself sliding into a seat at a half-empty bar, discreetly checking his watch to see how long it would be until Yohji would walk in.

Like clockwork, Aya had barely touched his beer when Yohji walked in, the bartender greeting him by a name that didn’t fit him and sliding him a drink he didn’t have to order. There were several empty seats between them and Aya kept his eyes to himself, even though he was acutely aware of Yohji glancing at him in passing and then again, harder, eventually placing him as the man who occasionally passed him on the street.

Another thing that hadn’t changed, apparently, was Yohji’s dislike of wasting time once he’d seen something that he wanted: the bartender seemed to politely disappear when Yohji slid into the seat next to Aya, his intentions painfully obvious and a cigarette smouldering between his fingers.

“Hey, have we met before?”

Finally Aya turned to actually look at Yohji, all at once seeming like a different man and achingly familiar. If he let his eyes linger a little too long, well, Yohji had been the one to play his hand first. “Perhaps in another life.”

Yohji’s laugh was obviously fake and nothing like the one Aya remembered. A mouthful of beer barely helped settle the nausea in his stomach, and he would have considered leaving right then and there had the smoke wafting from Yohji’s cigarette not been the same scent that had filled the back of the flower shop and later their van.

He hadn’t realised how much he would miss Weiss until it was gone.

“Well, my memory’s never been particularly great but I’ve definitely seen you around a few times. I couldn’t forget a face like yours.” They both knew it was a lie, but Aya was alone in knowing the full extent of it. Aya remembered frantic post-mission fucks, burning off the adrenaline that coursed through them like an aphrodisiac. He remembered quiet nights in the back of the flower shop, Yohji rubbing his thumbs over the calluses on Aya’s palms that could only have come from holding a sword as often as it did.

He remembered leaving Yohji at the nearest hospital, knowing that although Mamoru was an untrustworthy snake and a Takatori, he’d know how to keep Yohji safe while he recovered from his serious injuries.

Another life, indeed.

When Yohji held his right hand out, Aya looked down at the left one instead. As if able to tell where Aya was looking, Yohji curled his fingers in to hide them- but not before Aya saw the tan line left behind where his wedding ring usually sat. He ignored Yohji’s self introduction but took the offered hand eventually, feeling the faint lines of scars that wound across Yohji’s fingers.

There was no way that Yohji remembered what those wire-thin scars were from, but Aya did. If he was self-conscious about them, he didn’t show it, and Aya wasn’t about to ask and invite some made-up answer about how his hands had ended up in such a condition.

“Got a name?” Yohji asked, and Aya nearly laughed in his face. Instead, he made another stupid decisions in a long line of stupid decisions, taking his hand back from Yohji’s and wrapping it around his beer instead.

“Ran,” he said quietly, his real name sounding as fake as his tongue as Yohji’s new name had on his own. They weren’t Aya-and-Yohji anymore, and Aya wasn’t about to pretend that they still were.

“Ran,” Yohji repeated, rolling it flirtatiously off his tongue. “Short and sweet, I like it. You come here often, Ran?”

Yohji had used to grind on his nerves at the best of times. He had known what the quickest ways to set Aya off were, and he loved pushing Aya to his limits before bringing him back down with his clever hands and mouth. He’d pissed Aya off to no end more often than not.

But all of that had nothing on the sudden rage Aya felt when Yohji spoke to him like he was just another one night stand in a shitty bar. It wasn’t the way he’d expected to feel when finally face-to-face with the closest thing he’d ever had to a boyfriend (even if Knight had been fond of insisting that they had been something more serious than they ever actually had been). He’d been anticipating a certain smugness in proving that Yohji’s body remembered him even if his mind didn’t, not boiling anger at being treated like any of the other men that Yohji fed shitty lines to.

Aya had spent enough time learning how to stop letting his anger cloud his judgement, and he focused on his drink as he pushed the feeling away as much as he could. Still, it lingered enough to push him to be more blunt than he otherwise would have been, stealing the cigarette from between Yohji’s long fingers and taking the last drag before putting it out and asking, “Do you want to make small talk, or do you want to fuck?”

“...Can’t argue with that,” Yohji said, obviously trying to hide his surprise. He threw his own drink back and stood up, leaning close to Aya to murmur, “I know a good love hotel.”

Aya knew exactly which one he meant, having watched Yohji go into it more times than he could count, but he let Yohji lead the way regardless. The hotel was in an awful part of town, tactically unsound, and surrounded by too many surveillance points, and yet none of that mattered when Aya had Yohji pressed up against the wall of their hourly room, one hand holding his hair just as tightly as he liked it and the other shoved down the front of his pants.

“You don’t mess around, do you?” Yohji said a little breathlessly when Aya switched from kissing his lips to biting his neck. “Ah, no marks, Ran, I-”

“You what?” Aya said, some sick part of him wanting to hear it.

“I...I’m married,” Yohji admitted, the reminder of his wife not stopping his cock from filling out in Aya’s hand.

“Does she know?” Scraping his teeth over Yohji’s thudding pulse, Aya took horrifying pleasure in the way Yohji’s shame made his own cock press up against the fly of his pants. Yohji seemed to have no idea what to do with his hands, fluttering from Aya’s waist to his shoulders and around to his back, and Aya had never thought that he would miss Yohji’s smug way of knowing exactly how he liked to be touched.

“Know what?” Yohji eventually managed.

“Know that her husband takes off his ring-” Aya removed his fingers from Yohji’s hair and instead pinned his left hand to the wall over his head, “- and picks up men in bars?”

“Are you trying to _blackmail_ me?” Yohji said, and for a second Aya saw a fire in him much like the one he’d used to lo-...enjoy. It faded quickly, though, the amnesiac salaryman taking over from Yohji’s buried subconscious again.

“Ha!” Aya barked sharply. An average salaryman’s wages couldn’t come close to touching the kind of bloodstained money Aya made, despite the amount of it he gave away whenever he could, and what he wanted from Yohji was something that this man couldn’t possibly provide. “No, I’m not.”

Before Yohji could keep running his stupid mouth, Aya tugged him away from the wall and towards the bed, shooting him a look that had Yohji scrambling out of his stuffy suit while Aya neatly removed his own clothes. Where the real Yohji liked to push back, took charge as much as Aya did, and never did anything without oozing a certain degree of sensuality, this Yohji seemed to be at a loss for what to do when faced with someone like Aya.

It was hardly satisfying to get him down on all fours, even if he still somehow had an ass to die for. The Yohji who spent all day at a desk had far less muscle than the one who had spent his nights fighting for his life, but Aya could still recognise most of the scars that crossed his skin and even recall where many of them had come from. There were others that he didn’t recognise, though, and he quickly realised that they must have been from the explosion that had robbed Yohji of everything else that made him Yohji.

He hated them.

Once upon a time, Kudoh Yohji refused to be fucked with anything less than the expensive lube he kept in the second drawer of his nightstand, the glovebox of his car, and stashed under the cushions of the couch in the back room of the flower shop. He luxuriated in the finer things, even when he was contorted into ridiculous positions to get laid in his even more ridiculous car.

Whoever this man in front of Aya was, though, seemed perfectly okay with the cheap, hotel-supplied lube that would probably leave stains and feel uncomfortable if he didn’t wash it out soon enough.

Aya hated that, too.

“Fuck me,” Yohji pleaded as Aya thrust his fingers into him, his breath hitching when Aya effortlessly remembered exactly how to move his hand to press into Yohji’s prostate. The hotel’s condoms weren’t any higher quality than their lube, and for a moment Aya amused himself with wondering how many accidental pregnancies the place had caused. But that was hardly going to be a concern for the two of them, and Aya allowed himself a quiet groan as he pushed his cock into Yohji’s ass for the first time in too long.

His demeanour and his attitude and his build might have changed, but Yohji’s insides couldn’t lie about who he really was. Now that Aya didn’t have to look into his tired civilian eyes or hear him say anything other than _‘fuck’_ or _‘more’_ , he could almost pretend like nothing had changed. That he and Yohji had stopped into an anonymous hotel during an investigation, and then decided that their time alone could be spent productively.

And then Yohji called out “Ran,” balancing himself on one arm so that he could stroke his cock as Aya fucked him, and the fragile illusion was shattered. He’d known, of course, since the first time he’d laid eyes on this man that Kudoh Yohji was gone and that nothing short of a miracle would bring him back. That despite what Yohji had been fond of claiming, Aya’s cock wasn’t _actually_ miraculous, and he couldn’t possibly knock Yohji’s lost memories back into place alone.

The man he was fucking was a stranger he’d picked up in a bar, who just happened to look awfully like Aya’s dead lover, and nothing more.

Mechanically, there was pleasure in it as Aya continued fucking into Yohji, feeling his orgasm building up as Yohji chased his own pleasure. Emotionally, though, Aya could only wonder what he’d hoped to gain by chasing the attention of a man who couldn’t remember what they’d once shared, and who now lived in a completely different world to the one they’d used to face together.

In the morning, Yohji would wake up to his wife and Aya would wake up alone to another day of murdering people for money.

“Fuck, Ran, don’t stop, I’m gonna come,” Yohji groaned, drawing Aya out of his thoughts and making him realise that his pace had slowed as he’d spiralled deeper into self-loathing and misery. If fucking Yohji harder, the way he’d always liked it, would get them both finished quicker then Aya was happy to oblige. He wanted to come and then go as quickly as possible, every second that passed with Yohji another reminder of how much of an idiot he was.

Even if he hadn’t wanted it, Yohji had been given a second chance. Maybe he was wasting it by cheating on his wife at every opportunity, but that wasn’t Aya’s place to judge.

Aya had been given a second chance as well, when some kind civilian had finally noticed him bleeding out and called an ambulance. Much as Ken had survived being run through with Aya’s sword, Aya had survived being stabbed by a literal child who didn’t know where the fatal parts were, and here he was using his second chance to chase a ghost who didn’t even know he was a ghost.

He was done here.

Aya was vaguely aware of fucking Yohji through his orgasm, and he was fairly certain that he’d never had an orgasm quite as unsatisfying as the one that Yohji’s ass finally pulled from him. At least Yohji himself didn’t seem disappointed when Aya pulled out and threw the condom into the rubbish, his cheeks pink and his breath still coming heavy as he flipped over and sprawled out on his back.

“That was great,” Yohji said, running a hand through his sweaty hair and letting his other hand trace up Aya’s bicep. “We could hook up again sometime, if you want?”

Faking a yawn and ignoring the question, Aya settled down on the bed next to Yohji and showed him a very faint, very fake smile. “Wake me up when it’s time to leave?”

“Of course,” Yohji said, Aya rolling over to thwart Yohji’s obvious attempt to lean in and kiss him. He pretended to be asleep until Yohji crept into the bathroom, the shower starting up a moment later. His version of quiet had nothing on Aya’s assassin-quiet, though, and there was no chance of Yohji hearing so much as a single rustle as Aya put his clothes back on and made a silent exit. The only evidence he’d ever been there would be a dirty condom in the rubbish bin, and that would get burned away into nothing soon enough.

Even if his subconscious still remembered some things, that wasn’t Yohji, and nothing good would come from Aya staying to futilely pull on the threads of memory. Holding his head high, Aya crossed the lobby and pulled his phone from his pocket, dialing an international number that had been taunting him for months.

“Ken,” Aya said as the call connected and he stepped out onto the street, the sudden emptiness inside him threatening to swallow him whole, “I’ll be on a flight to England tomorrow.”

Ken’s excitement even through the phone was palpable, as if it were his badgering and not Aya’s own fuckups that had finally led to Aya taking the invitation that had been dangled in front of him since being rescued from the side of a dirty road. “Really? You’re joining Krypton Brand?”

If Aya had been one for sentimentality, he might have looked back over his shoulder at the shitty hotel he’d left Yohji behind in, pretending as if he could see him one last time through the thick walls. As it was, though, he simply walked off into the quiet night, leaving the married stranger who wore Kudoh Yohji’s face in the past where he belonged.

“There’s nothing left for me here.”

**Author's Note:**

> Come see me on [Tumblr](http://socialdegenerate.tumblr.com) or [Twitter](http://twitter.com/socialdegener8)


End file.
